desiderata
by copesmate
Summary: "Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness." During and post-Milagro (6x18). Padgett's strange control over Scully has aftershocks. There's nothing like feeling yourself emotionally autopsied to shake your foundations to their roots.
1. Chapter 1

1\. exordium

"After this, the Sovereign of my soul said to me: "These are the designs for which I have chosen you. That is why I have given you so many graces and have taken quite special care of you from your very cradle. I Myself have been your teacher and your director only that I might prepare you for the accomplishment of this great design and confide to you this great treasure which I am displaying to you here." Then prostrating myself on the ground, I exclaimed with St Thomas, "My Lord and my God". I find it impossible to express what I felt on that occasion. I did not know whether I was in heaven or on earth."

St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, November 3, 1689

* * *

The sound of his typing was faster than the pounding of her heart in her ears but only just, a clacking that chased the frenetic beat of her heart, then beat in time with it, then overtook it. She stopped and turned: she had not realized the extent of this magnetism; that she was not the south pole to his north, but rather the iron filings aligned around his magnetic field, like the blood splatter from an exit wound. There was a sort of aura in the hall, emanating from his room, almost somatesthetic in nature; she was uncannily aware of her pulse, her beating heart, the cartilaginous rings of her trachea contracting as she swallowed—the heaviness and vulnerability of flesh and existence.

Room 42 beckoned her, a comforting mass of shadows and soft sound. Her knuckles paused, inches from his door; if she knocked now, it would be a tremulous, soft sound. Submissive. Questioning. Her heart was beating faster now, in tune with his typing.

When he opened the door, what would she see? Bright lights, sterilized cleanliness, white walls, a shining autopsy table on which he would dissect her memories, pick her apart and assemble her viscera before her in the shape of a human, all quivering muscle and bloody bones. What measure of intimacy had they shared in that church, when he laid her raw, pulpy, palpitating heart before her? She felt vulnerable—emotionally, spiritually vulnerable, a different breed of emotion than physical vulnerability. Under his bright, blue-grey gaze she had felt herself autopsied, evaluated—butchered. That church had felt like an abattoir: her blood sloshed around her ankles as he carved out her heart and held it out for her to admire, bloody and throbbing with life and devotion.

Her hand shook; she pulled it back slightly.

Some part of her cowered before the light that she felt but could not see pouring from the door. She was unsettled by just how easily he had told her about herself, yet simultaneously impressed. In this, was she St. Margaret Mary to his Jesus? It was a heavy, sacrilegious thought, and it made her falter again.

She couldn't help but think of him as an exhibitionist. There was something appallingly raw and open about the way he spoke about his interest in her, something in his eyes that sought her shock and seemed to relish in the way she recoiled from him. She wondered if maybe she wasn't seeking an emotional counterpoint to her partner's cheerful ignorance, near-nauseating ebullience, and can-do attitude. The stranger's dark intensity stymied and enthralled her in equal measure; he had unraveled her, unwrapped her; he had seen what lay within and, standing firm, had passed seemingly no judgment on her. Would Mulder do the same?

She and her partner had magnetism between them that threatened to burgeon into more than the chaste philia they shared—a magnetism that he seemed ignorant of and that she dared not act upon. This was another reason she stood frozen here in the dingy hallway, afraid to move forward yet unable to flee. To go to Mulder would be to forever resign herself to safety and predictability: she would never assent to vulnerability, to sitting idly by while her psyche was shucked clean and bare, while layer upon layer was held up to the light and examined, analyzed, and catalogued into his extensive archive of oddities and anomalies. The stranger vivisected her neatly, with no need for discussion or exegesis; it was clean, undemanding, painless. Being vulnerable and understood was easier than becoming vulnerable and understood; she loathed the idea of baring her soul, yet relished in its bareness.

But why was she thinking in terms of eternities? If she were to speak to the stranger now, she would be committing minutes of her life, nothing more. It was irrational that she felt as though she was about to embark on her own odyssey and be years returning.

This newfound openness was like ambrosia to her, but Dana had always been a woman of restraint. Still, she wanted one last taste of that bizarre, sensual euphoria she had felt thrumming through her veins upon first holding the milagro pendant between her fingers. The hand that wasn't poised in midair fingered that pendant thoughtlessly, following in the etched lines that limned flames in the cold metal. She was seized by a violent, escapist urge to sprint from the building and keep going until she collapsed, but pushed it away. If she were in the practice of being honest with herself, she would have admitted the truth that pushed her to act now: that she was inflamed, bleeding, desperately seeking containment and validation.

But there was a part of her screaming at her to flee.

 _Kyrie eleison_ , she thought with conviction. Her heart pounded a frantic, violent tattoo in her ears; she knocked on the door. Two raps, weaker than she had hoped, sharper than she had feared.

The typing stopped, abruptly.

When she saw him, she was calmed. He was just man, just flesh; a pale brunet with a clear, strong gaze and a mustache/goatee combination that looked as though it had taken years to reach its current fullness. Average height, average build, average face—his nose was a bit too pointed and his chin a bit too sharp for him to be unmemorable. She felt none of her earlier rapture, but rather an internal clash of will, as though her instincts screamed at her to leave while her heart told her to stay, to override the delicate balance of impassivity and compassion that it had taken her years to construct and considerable effort to maintain.

In her hand, the milagro charm was cold and heavy; she extended it to him with a half-smile. "Hi," she said. "I—um, I was going next door and I thought that I'd return this."

She could feel his voice _upon_ her without the sensation of hearing; it was sinuous, persuasive—she would have described it as sensual if asked, like cold silk on bare skin. She respired, inhaling through her nose and exhaling through her mouth. It made her feel at least somewhat in control, which she desperately needed. No one should have been able to make her feel the way she did at that moment: small yet powerful— _chosen_ —an enigmatic mix of revered and enchained. _Jesus fucking Christ_. Shit. Damn. Her gelid exterior was usually enough to make her diminutive height of five-foot-who-cares seem towering to those around her—she may not have been commanding, but she certainly command _ed_ —and it was usually enough to make her feel impervious. There were times, of course, that all the ice in her soul had not been enough (a whole damn glacier would not have been enough)—abduction, cancer, Duane Berry, Donnie Pfaster—instances that made little parts of her curl up and cry about the vast and unimaginable cruelty of the world, and the way the vitreous eyes of God seemed to simply slide past her without consideration or compassion.

"Because I can't return the gesture," she replied to the word she didn't hear but still processed. "I can't."

That was how she found herself in his spartan apartment, cradled in the fug of cigarette smoke, staring at notecards on the wall.

 _K.N. MURDERS HIS OWN BEST INTENTIONS_

There are others as well, arranged in neat little rows across his wall, arranged so that the little 3x5 cards create one massive rectangle of those same dimensions. She skims them; they read like fragments of a story told in sensations and hallucinations.

 _DARK BLOOD FLOWED IN THE FOSSE, SOULS OUT OF EREBUS_

 _KNOW THAT THY SORROW IS MY ECSTASY_

 _CONSUME MY HEART AWAY; SICK WITH DESIRE AND FASTENED TO A DYING ANIMAL_

 _THE CHOICE OF PYRE OR PYRE—TO BE REDEEMED FROM FIRE BY FIRE_

 _NATURE, RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW_

 _SHE PASSED AND LEFT NO QUIVER IN THE VEINS_

 _I AM SO ANGRY IN MIND, SO HEATED WITHIN MY BREAST_

* * *

This is what she thinks of, collapsed supine on the floor in Mulder's apartment, chest rent apart by the sheer force of Padgett's mind.

 _I am so angry in mind, so heated within my breast_ —so heated—Lord God take my heart full of devotion into Your own holy breast—and do what? She screams and struggles but to what end? He does not need to hold her down to open her up. Yet Ken Naciamento holds her down as she screams and fights—flails—pressing his hand into her chest.

There is no God here, no holy fire or sainted light. She is not Margaret Mary, the devoted and ever-loving servant; in his dark, cold eyes she is _meat_ , carefully selected and groomed for the slaughter. Padgett may not understand the motive he has imbued Naciamento with, nor the vulnerability that he has inculcated Dana with, but in this moment she can see it all: that Philip Padgett is not a creator but a destroyer; that from his hands springs not life but the deep, consumptive void of the anathema; that in his mind is not the unending spring of creation, but rather the sempiternal winter of a supermassive black hole. She is meat and this is agony, burning, searing through her chest in a bright gouge, a font of ichor blooming within her.

She can _feel_ the cartilage that connects her ribs and sternum sever, feels her arteries detaching from her heart… She has her gun— _where did she get her gun_?—and slams the muzzle onto his chest. She fires, fires, fires; his expression over her does not change, and the empty barrel clicks, clicks, clicks. She _SCREAMS_ , wordless, helpless, staring up at the emotionless face of judgment. Naciamento's fingers brush her heart and she should not feel them but she does, these blunt instruments so unlike the fine scalpel's edge of his mind.

She thinks of Padgett's notecards and their gory prose, she thinks of how safe this apartment used to feel—she wonders where the _fuck_ Mulder is. He is supposed to protect her, her avenging angel, for she has come to rely on him as her rock, her anchor. These will be her last thoughts, these thoughts of him: cold fury, warm love, blazing agony, chilling loss. _Though I should walk in the valley of the shadow of death, no evil would I fear, for you are with me._ And just when she thinks this is the end, that if Death before her does not rip her heart free then she will sink into this dark pool of agony and drown, just now comes the door slamming open and there he is. Hooded Death disintegrates before her eyes and her chest is empty of agony and painfully full as Mulder leans over her prone form, his frantic eyes belying the impassive slackness in his lips. The light from the hall limns a stark white-gold corona around his head, and she wraps herself around him, spilling wordless, tearless animal sobs out into his skin.

Disenthralled suddenly, she springs back from him in a violent recoil, unbuttoning her bloodstained blouse with shaking hands as Mulder looks on mutely, confused and shaken. She stares down at herself and is faintly relieved to see that there is no hole there, no gaping maw with ribs for teeth and an insatiable hunger where her heart should be; instead, between her breasts and extending under the bridge of her bra there is a thin, pale line of scar tissue, situated slightly to the left.

Mulder squints at her, then realizes what she sees. "Was that—was that there before?"

Dana does not answer him, but cries in earnest now, tears pouring profusely out over her cheekbones and dripping off her chin. She folds herself into his body and presses her head to his chest so hard that she can hear both their heartbeats echoing dully in her head.

* * *

Regarding the notecards on Padgett's wall: the note about K.N. and the one about blood in the fosse are both actually on Padgett's wall in the episode; the former relates directly to the story and the latter is one of many lines from Ezra Pound's 'Canto I' that are on the wall. 'Canto I' follows the story of the Odyssey.  
The other lines are from various poems (in the following order): 'Hap' by Thomas Hardy, 'Sailing to Byzantium' by William Butler Yeats, 'Little Gidding' by T. S. Eliot, 'In Memoriam' by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 'Gentildonna' by Ezra Pound, and 'Judith', which is attributed to Cynewulf. Most of the lines I chose are beat-you-over-the-head obviously related to both the episode and the story I'm writing (lol im very subtle), which the lines from Canto I frankly weren't.


	2. Chapter 2

_She touched his palms and the stigmata opened under her fingers, puckered red with cruor; he wept openly from a wound in his side, streaking his bared torso and hip with sanguine. He was all starved angles, as though drained fully of blood, dry skin pulled taut over sharp bones. His gaze in life had been clear and eager; resurrected, it was beatific but cold, melding the grace of a saint with the coldness of their depiction, all gilt and glass and sightless, opaque eyes. She was seized by sensation: drenched in abattoir stench, the stranger appears to Saint Margaret Mary, offering up in both hands his smoker's heart, the damaged, trailing coronary arteries clogged with plaque._

 _The familiar: Mulder has a heathen's heart, beating grey-black and pulpy in his chest, overlarge and easily broken, easily swayed. It puts the burning heart in her chest to shame that, broken so often, his heart still beats and beats. Her heart is smaller, harder to break. It burns with the flames of devotion, a consuming blaze that remains unshared. If she reaches out to him now, will his heart accept hers?_

 _She stood before_ him _, breathing in his scent-cigarette smoke, musk, and blood-watching his heart pulse in his hands, burning ever so brightly. The stigmata bloomed like gloriosa lilies, and she plunged her hand into the wound in his side, first two fingers, then the whole thing. The gesture felt intimately sexual, almost masturbatory, until she grasped his kidney and_ squeezed _, crushing the organ in the palm of her hand. His face was impassive; even if he were still alive, Dana thought with some annoyance, loss of one kidney would have no discernable impact on bodily function. But it felt good to squash a part of him, to feel the blood deluge over her hand and along her arm, dripping off her elbow to soak her bare foot. She was dimly aware that she was naked, naked as innocent Eve, her body limned camellia white and camellia pink in the stark, clinical light of his rapture. She drew her hand out of his body and stared at it; there was a hole in the center of her palm, through which she could see identical wounds in both of her feet._

She wakes, sweating, alone in her bed; she hears soft snores in the distance that tell her that he is sleeping on the couch tonight, giving her space. Her arm still feels wet, but when she looks at it, there's nothing except bare skin and thin, downy hair. The pale, spidery line between her breasts aches and aches, and she finds herself wondering if she'll ever feel whole again. Dana wishes Mulder wasn't so conscientious about her right now. She could use arms wrapped around her, for she is so small, so small in the in the eyes of God.

She declines to take part in the vivisection of Padgett's apartment, involved as she was; she also declines to mention the events leading up to his death, describing her experience with Naciamento only as a painful yet brief mental attack that she still cannot begin to explain or understand—a sudden migraine that ended as Padgett removed his own heart. Only Mulder knows about the bloodstained shirt (washed twice then incinerated, which he doesn't know about) and the fine scar that bisects her chest (scrubbed 'til red—and 'til rationality set in—in the shower). She still hasn't told him everything-she isn't sure if she ever will fully divulge.

Her preoccupation with the incident feels irrational and childish. She has long since made peace with the realization that she was only ever a character to him, that from the first time he laid eyes on her she was nothing more than a jumble of words, shifting adjectives, a character to be analyzed, rationalized, and finally put to text, applied to prose as though she were an errant thought whose only manifestation was through him, whose only _real_ corporeal form was ink on paper. The realities of her flesh, of her mind and soul, they were all incidental to him; her humanity, her striving, her heart all meaningless, her life too prolix for his interest. When he saw her he thought _titian_ ,he thought _blue eyes_ , _sharp eyes_ , _somber cut to her parted lips_ , _pulchritudinous too ugly a word to describe her_ ,he thought _sensual depths belied by the ostensible coldness of her deportment_ , _a heart that aches to be exactly as rampant as she had never, would never allow_. He thought _fatally, stunningly prepossessing_ ; foreshadowing, perhaps, the danger that his _prepossession_ would incur. Then, somehow, he knew her to the depths of her heart-but had he? Oh, he had known a handful of things, the type of incidentals that, in retrospect, were more indicative of long-term stalking than of some piercing insight to the crux of her being, some preternatural sight to where her heart of hearts lay beating a disembodied tattoo, a veritable princess in a tower for which he would be the charming and fearless savior-knight. He knew she _ran_ , for Christ's sake.

(This is the part at which Dana allows herself to turn off the water and step out of the shower, or finally close her eyes, forcibly clear her mind, and try to sleep. But sometimes, she continues:)

The problem is not that he knew her-for Dana at this point can say with some certainty that he barely knew her at all-but that he convinced her that he did. Hypnosis? But she doesn't believe in that, at least not really. She believes in the gullibility of Man, in the human desperation for the supernatural that is so profound and pronounced that hundreds upon thousands of people beguile themselves into belief. By this token, she believes in her own skeptical immunity to these kinds of things.

"What I keep coming back to," Mulder says abruptly, something he tends to do these days if she stays silent too long, "is _Matilda_."

"Matilda?" She thinks of X-Files, racking her brain for a case so striking it would warrant the mononym, and comes to- " _The Roald Dahl book_ about the little girl who-"

"Whose untapped brilliance manifested as psychokinetic power? That's right."

"You can't be serious."

"Why not?"

"Why not-Mulder, it's a fictional story, that's why not. An unscientific account of an entirely imagined phenomenon that was written entirely to entertain, not to serve as an explanation when science fails us-"

He raises his hands in mock surrender, and Dana realizes she has been snapping at him.

"I'm sorry, Mulder," she says with a groan. "I'm just not feeling the particular connection between the two."

He smiles at her, and she is seized once more by that image of his heart overextended and consumed by fluctuant desire. "It's fine," he says. "I'm glad to see you argumentative again. Now, what I was thinking wasn't that his ability to-"

"Project? Control? Contrive?"

"All of that, was not born out of sheer boredom like in _Matilda_ , but sheer dedication. You know, like those people whose religious fervor creates actual, corporeal stigmata? It's like reverse- _Matilda_ , really. He's using so much of himself that he creates his own reality-his microcosm becomes macro."

While he speaks, he pours her a cup of coffee. Dana half-shrugs as he slides the steaming mug across her dining table. "I mean, it's as good an explanation as any. It wasn't-it wasn't _normal_ , what he did. It wasn't real. It feels like some kind of dream, when you wake up and realize just how strange and irrational the whole thing was. I read parts of that book he was writing-it's exactly how I felt at the time, but it's also not _me_ at all. I'm not the person he wrote about, but I was."

"I'd hope not," Mulder says jovially. "Actually, considering all that bodice-ripper prose about how _arousing_ behavioral pathology apparently is . . ."

"What did he call you again?"

"Hegelian," Mulder says, mock-hurt. "Scully, have you _ever_ known me to be Hegelian?"

"Not in this lifetime," Dana says with a small grin. She sips her coffee gingerly and finds it scaldingly hot.

They sit in comfortable silence for a few minutes. Dana's train of thought refuels.

It isn't that he so blatantly dehumanized her but that she accepted it. The truly haunting thing is that, for however briefly (or, terrifyingly, not) he held sway over her, her mind was not her own. He wrote that she was molten devotion with an icy shell and a loose-cannon libido, and so she became. _The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God_.

"Do you think he's done something like this before?"

Padgett's words come back to her- _ache, pang, prick, twinge_ , words he associated with arousal. She feels them now and they are _fear_ : a dull ache at the base of her skull, a sharp, empathic pang of horror that ricochets around her cranial cavity, the eerie prick of gooseflesh up and down her arms, a nauseous twinge in the pit of her stomach.

"I don't think so," she says at length. "Or at least, not to this degree of success."

"What do you mean?"

"When I . . . spoke to him. In his room. He told me that all of his books before had been failures. Only this one was shaping up. He told me he thought he was getting it right."

"But we don't know for certain."

"No," she says, and shakes her head slowly, suddenly weary. "It's entirely possible that if he'd survived, this one would have just been a 'failure' too."

"He said that characters chose the writer," Mulder says slowly. "This could have been the first time his work had ever gotten this dangerous. Maybe this is the first time he ever wrote something that caused crimes."

"He burned the book when he finished it, didn't he?" They are leaning closer to each other now, sparking with discovery, impulses ricocheting along neuron pathways in sync.

"So there would be no way of finding the others if he disposed of them all the same way."

"But what if he didn't? He finished this one. If I had to guess, I'd say I don't think he finished the others." Dana doesn't like this ascension (descent, in her opinion) into the realm of conjecture, but the crackle of lightning fear in her veins drives her forward. "It's a long shot, but what if he kept older manuscripts? Or at least notes-he had all those notecards taped to his wall."

"They were mostly poetry," Mulder says. "Pound, Yeats, Tennyson, Eliot. So far, there's literally nothing there. No abandoned manuscripts, no old notebooks or conveniently detailed journal or anything. It's just a typewriter and a bed and coffee and cigarettes."

She sighs and sips her coffee again. "There's probably no way that he kept his old work," she admits. "I can't imagine him wanting to keep evidence of his failures close at hand."

When Mulder begins to reply, he speaks tentatively, as though he is laying out his words on a precarious limb, testing its resilience with slow steps. "I think that might be why he, uh, ended the story with your death," he says cautiously.

"Elaborate."

"Remember when he told us he made a mistake? That you were already in love?" Dana huffs a nervous laugh but says nothing, and he doggedly continues. Words laid down in air as a path to understanding; the signs of things, not the things themselves. "We both read that manuscript. Most of it was based on you being attracted to 'the stranger'-Padgett. When it turned out you weren't, his story collapsed. He couldn't compensate for reality. He . . . created an idea of you that didn't match up with the actual you. I think, actually, it was that failure-on the heels of what sounds like his greatest success-that really got to him."

"What struck me was that Naciamento never realized his motive," she replies. "He was just . . . shadow, really."

"That's what got you? Not his depiction of you?"

Dana blushes. "I skimmed those."

She had, actually. After all-but close-reading the first couple of paragraphs he wrote about her, Naciamento's nemesis- _For Special Agent Dana Scully of the F.B.I., the day began like any other; she rose with the sun, drank her matutinal cup of coffee-a dark roast that she took black, ostensibly for the caffeine, as she would not admit to herself just how many of her daily habits were shaped to disprove whatever claims to weakness her male peers might concoct-bathed, and dressed herself. Her beauty belied her somewhat spinsterly devotion to routine; she was, after all, a striking woman whose captivating features and titian hair could be juxtaposed tenebristically with the icy façade she donned every morning to face the world_ -she had abandoned the task, opting instead to give each page a perfunctory scan, looking for insights into Naciamento's psyche _._ What strikes her now as heavy-handed prose had at the time felt like a filleting, accompanied by a girlish, hormonal excitement that manifested itself too physically for her to feel comfortable reading in public.

"I think he made a story that was more about him than about its characters. You and Naciamento were both half-baked, one-dimensional characters that he couldn't control. Naciamento was his superhuman mastermind who excised hearts for some inarticulable reason. You were his damsel in distress, underestimated by your male coworkers, longing for understanding in a weirdly hormonal way. He couldn't reconcile either of you, let alone both of you."

"So he decided to kill me off."

"But the problem was that Naciamento still had no motive."

"So despite the Jungian viewpoint that Naciamento chose him and could direct him, Padgett still couldn't deliver. He wouldn't have been able to deal with that, would he? He said he lived in his head, writing. He finally realized that his failure as a writer was his inability to understand his characters, or at least to assign them humanity."

"And he turned his mind on himself, so to speak."

"Excised his own heart," Dana intones in a breathless whisper, nerves trilling.


End file.
